Stop Freaking Out About Hate Speech
The story’s nearly identical on every campus: a few knuckle-draggers break into a building, hack an email account, or just find some public space to deface under cover of night, all for the spectacularly cowardly purpose of anonymously expressing their stern disapproval of the Blacks or the Gays or the Jews or the Foreigners. Seattle, well-known bastion of progressive liberalism that it is, is sadly no exception—last week we had at least a couple of incidents of hateful graffiti here at the University of Washington (aimed at the usual targets) both around campus and in my own department building. My grad colleagues are all atwitter over what to do about it: last week, someone suggested that we all wear pink triangles and rainbow flags (to show solidarity with a gay professor who found homophobic slurs on his door) and today the idea came up that we should push for a required class on “white hetero male supremacy, class and xenophobia” to get at the root of the issue. While this proposal may or may not be a worthwhile idea on its own merits, I doubt it will do much to stem the public expression of prejudice in pluralistic higher-ed contexts. So what response would I recommend?
Simple: none.
Or, more specifically, that the administrative powers-that-be release the standard condemnatory statements from on high, concerned students and faculty don the relevant buttons and stickers, and everyone continue going about their business. I have three reasons for advocating this low-key approach:
1) Prejudice is notoriously resistant to logical attack. A required class explaining the many, many reasons as to why prejudice is bad would likely do two things: a) bore the anti-racist passions out of the vast majority of well-intentioned students, and b) elicit the expected responses from the closeted bigots with no actual change in opinion. And if the class weren’t required, how many among those two groups do you expect would take it voluntarily?
The sad fact is that it is extremely difficult for institutions to effect enduring cognitive change in their members from the top down. One of the cardinal findings of my field (mass communications) is that the media, for example, are extraordinarily bad at persuading people to revise deeply-held opinions. On the rare occasions when opinions do end up changing, it’s usually as a result of personal relationships with trusted parties, as when a close friend reveals she’s gay or leads her less-enlightened associates out of the ghettos of racism by way of example.
2) Like terrorism, the perpetrators’ goal is to provoke precisely this type of frenzied hand-wringing. Every news report, every new university initiative, every distressed conversation is a victory for these idiots. That’s the only way they know they’ve made an impact. While it’s impossible to ignore hateful outbursts completely, minimizing their institutional effects denies the bigots the satisfaction of having struck a nerve. They think we’re weak, so the best defense is to prove them wrong by demonstrating that we cannot and will not be stopped by a few nasty words scrawled on the quad walkway.
Note that this strategy is only meant to apply to broad communicative acts, not to actual hate crimes such as assault, targeted harrassment, sexual violence, etc. However, fortunately for us, most campus racists are far too pusillanimous to go much further than the former.
3) We’ve got bigger fish to fry. While we’re all running around like decapitated chickens over how to respond, we’re directing valuable time and resources away from less visible and more consequential issues of racial consequence. For example, I would argue that cuts to student-loan, work-study, and minority-targeted funds for higher education bear a bit more directly on low-income and minority students’ academic prospects than anonymous hate speech. The list goes on: disproportionately low minority graduation rates for minorities, especially blacks; the correlated underrepresentation in both the student body and faculty; campus profiling by authorities; affirmative action; etc. We would all be better served with more attention spent on these questions and less on attention-whoring vandalism.
Published on October 9, 2006 at 2:07 pm.
4 Comments.
Filed under racism, academia.
